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Red Hat Advances Enterprise Virtualization Platform with New Release

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 Globally Available with New Features Spanning Scalability, Networking and Storage, Including Integration with Red Hat Storage

RALEIGH, N.C
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December 5, 2012
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Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced advancements for its enterprise virtualization platform with the global availability of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1. The 3.1 release brings Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization forward with compelling new features to enhance its scalability, user administration and management interface, networking, storage and virtual desktop functionality. With this release, Red Hat also brings further flexibility for the combination of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and the full Red Hat portfolio, including its Red Hat Storage and Red Hat Enterprise Linux platforms.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization is the only mission-critical end-to-end, open source virtualization infrastructure designed for enterprise users that is available today. The Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 release, which debuted in Jan. 2012, marked a significant industry milestone, offering features, performance, scalability and cost advantages to enterprises. Today, with the introduction of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization’s Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor holds 19 of the 27 published SPECvirt_sc2010 (www.spec.org) performance benchmarks, including the best 2-socket and 4-socket scores and the only published 8-socket scores. At 50 to 70 percent lower cost compared to alternative solutions, it can also offer organizations significant economic advantages.

Key 3.1 Feature Additions

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 incorporates several new key features. For its main platform, 3.1 enables increased scalability of guest virtual machines, now providing support for up to 160 logical CPUs and up to 2 terabytes of memory, per virtual machine, and updates its KVM hypervisor to support the latest industry-standard x86 processors. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization shares the same base KVM hypervisor technology as Red Hat Enterprise Linux and maintains common ABI compatibility, enabling optimized flexibility for combining the two platforms from a single vendor.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 also includes an updated user interface, improved cross-platform web administration portal, updated reporting dashboard, new networking capabilities and enhanced disk storage. The incorporation of a technology preview of storage live migration adds the flexibility to migrate virtual machine disk files between storage domains without having to power down the virtual machine. The power user portal has been enhanced with resource quota functionality to enable self-service for test/development and other private cloud use cases. The release also features new advancements for the platform’s VDI capabilities, including a new virtual desktop autostart policy, improved WAN optimizations and an improved virtual desktop client.

With 3.1, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization also expands its localization enablement with support for English, French, Spanish, Simplified Chinese and Japanese, enabling the platform to be used even more widely around the globe.

Red Hat Storage Integration

A key addition to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 is integration with Red Hat Storage, Red Hat’s scale-out, open source storage software solution for the management of data, including file and object, structured and unstructured. Based on the GlusterFS technology Red Hat received from its Oct. 2011 acquisition of Gluster, Inc., Red Hat Storage Server 2.0 became available worldwide in June 2012, providing enterprise customers with open, unified scale-out storage software.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 provided the ability to access virtual images/storage over iSCSI, Fibre-Channel NFS or on local storage. With Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1, the platform’s versatility is now broadened, enabling it to access the secure, shared storage pool managed by Red Hat Storage. In addition to providing the essential building blocks for open hybrid clouds, this integration also offers enterprises reduced operational costs, expanded portability, choice of infrastructure, flexibility, scalability, availability and the power of community-driven innovation with the contributions of the open source oVirt and Gluster projects. The combination of these platforms is the first step toward Red Hat’s vision of an integrated and converged Red Hat Storage and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization node that serves both compute and storage resources.

Availability

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 is globally available to subscribing Red Hat customers today. A fully supported, 60-day trial of the release is also available at www.redhat.com/promo/rhev3.

“Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization is a key platform in the Red Hat portfolio that enables enterprises to leverage the power of the open source development model to drive innovation for virtualization. The 3.1 release is an important milestone for the product as it delivers key features and integrations that our customers are looking for. The integration of the product with Red Hat Storage, for example, brings virtual storage capabilities to enterprises that are not currently available in traditional virtualization solutions.”

“As early adopters of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we enjoyed our collaboration that included learning, adoption, migration and implementing a growing new set of Linux applications. And with KVM virtualization radically altering that landscape, it has become necessary for not only a reliable management tool, but also one that can work with our existing datacenter assets and supporting infrastructure. Our Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 pilot met that need with remarkably thin integration and allows us to expand provisioning and management of hosts beyond our systems engineering team.”

Satinder Sethi, vice president, Data Center Solutions, Cisco

“Red Hat continues to innovate in the open source community, and with the release of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1, customers are offered important advances in open virtualization technology that will allow them to further drive operational efficiency and reduce costs to operate their datacenters. Together, Cisco and partners like Red Hat offer flexible and scalable capabilities for diverse datacenter workloads and their business needs.”

Gerry Hackett, vice president, Server Platform Engineering, Dell

“We’re pleased to continue evolving our relationship with Red Hat around virtualization and cloud computing. For those customers interested in open source, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization is a natural fit for Dell systems and enables us to provide compelling performance, scalability, flexibility and cost benefits to our joint customers. This goes a step further with the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 today.”

Doug Fischer, vice president and general manager of Systems Software, Intel

“Intel’s long-time commitment to open, standards-based solutions has consistently delivered top-notch performance and scalability in virtualized environments, with optimization for RAS capabilities and Intel® Virtualization Technology. Organizations can look to the combination of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization on Intel® Xeon® processor-based servers for benchmark performance to support their demanding mission-critical applications.”

Maria Olson, Head of Global Alliances, NetApp

“Red Hat and NetApp have collaborated for over a decade to bring greater performance, scalability and business agility to our joint customers. As a recognized leader in storage for virtual environments, NetApp is committed to working with industry leaders such as Red Hat to enable our customers to choose the best solutions for their environments. The combination of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 and NetApp® Data ONTAP®, the world's #1 storage operating system, delivers compelling benefits to organizations seeking open virtualization solutions.”

Red Hat is the world's leading provider of open source software solutions, using a community-powered approach to reliable and high-performing cloud, Linux, middleware, storage and virtualization technologies. Red Hat also offers award-winning support, training, and consulting services. As the connective hub in a global network of enterprises, partners, and open source communities, Red Hat helps create relevant, innovative technologies that liberate resources for growth and prepare customers for the future of IT. Learn more at http://www.redhat.com.

Forward-Looking Statements

Certain statements contained in this press release may constitute "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements provide current expectations of future events based on certain assumptions and include any statement that does not directly relate to any historical or current fact. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including: risks related to delays or reductions in information technology spending; the effects of industry consolidation; the ability of the Company to compete effectively; uncertainty and adverse results in litigation and related settlements; the integration of acquisitions and the ability to market successfully acquired technologies and products; the inability to adequately protect Company intellectual property and the potential for infringement or breach of license claims of or relating to third party intellectual property; the ability to deliver and stimulate demand for new products and technological innovations on a timely basis; risks related to data and information security vulnerabilities; ineffective management of, and control over, the Company's growth and international operations; fluctuations in exchange rates; and changes in and a dependence on key personnel, as well as other factors contained in our most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q (copies of which may be accessed through the Securities and Exchange Commission's website at http://www.sec.gov), including those found therein under the captions "Risk Factors" and "Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations". In addition to these factors, actual future performance, outcomes, and results may differ materially because of more general factors including (without limitation) general industry and market conditions and growth rates, economic and political conditions, governmental and public policy changes and the impact of natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods. The forward-looking statements included in this press release represent the Company's views as of the date of this press release and these views could change. However, while the Company may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, the Company specifically disclaims any obligation to do so. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing the Company's views as of any date subsequent to the date of this press release.

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About Red Hat

Red Hat is the world’s leading provider of open source software solutions, using a community-powered approach to reliable and high-performing cloud, Linux, middleware, storage and virtualization technologies. Red Hat also offers award-winning support, training, and consulting services. As the connective hub in a global network of enterprises, partners, and open source communities, Red Hat helps create relevant, innovative technologies that liberate resources for growth and prepare customers for the future of IT. Learn more at http://www.redhat.com.

Forward-looking statements

Certain statements contained in this press release may constitute "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements provide current expectations of future events based on certain assumptions and include any statement that does not directly relate to any historical or current fact. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including: risks related to delays or reductions in information technology spending; the effects of industry consolidation; the ability of the Company to compete effectively; the integration of acquisitions and the ability to market successfully acquired technologies and products; uncertainty and adverse results in litigation and related settlements; the inability to adequately protect Company intellectual property and the potential for infringement or breach of license claims of or relating to third party intellectual property; the ability to deliver and stimulate demand for new products and technological innovations on a timely basis; risks related to data and information security vulnerabilities; ineffective management of, and control over, the Company’s growth and international operations; fluctuations in exchange rates; and changes in and a dependence on key personnel, as well as other factors contained in our most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q (copies of which may be accessed through the Securities and Exchange Commission’s website at http://www.sec.gov), including those found therein under the captions "Risk Factors" and "Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations". In addition to these factors, actual future performance, outcomes, and results may differ materially because of more general factors including (without limitation) general industry and market conditions and growth rates, economic and political conditions, governmental and public policy changes and the impact of natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods. The forward-looking statements included in this press release represent the Company’s views as of the date of this press release and these views could change. However, while the Company may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, the Company specifically disclaims any obligation to do so. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing the Company’s views as of any date subsequent to the date of this press release.